


let spill the flowers from my ribcage to your palms, dusky, harrowed

by fruitwhirl



Series: peraltiago tumblr prompts [8]
Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: F/M, Post-Prison, i would consider this a nice angst/fluff blend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-19
Updated: 2018-06-19
Packaged: 2019-05-25 08:26:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14973143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fruitwhirl/pseuds/fruitwhirl
Summary: “I’m fine.”She knows he isn’t.Her arms move to snake around his waist from behind, hands resting on his hips, she presses her mouth, softly—with barely the weight of a feather, it seems—to the small mole on his left shoulder. Her lips linger there, her breath warm against his skin. He can feel them, almost tickling the shoulder blade, when she whispers, “I’m here.”It’s just two words—two syllables, six letters, and one mark of punctuation—but they hang there, and every syllable, every letter, every apostrophe lingers in the air for one, two, three beats. And then he feels one of her hands slip, trail up his forearm, and then she’s cupping his cheek in her palm. He nods as she applies a small amount of pressure, turning his head slightly, so she can look at him in the face.





	let spill the flowers from my ribcage to your palms, dusky, harrowed

**Author's Note:**

> i was requested on tumblr for "post-prison cuddles" and you can blame sy for this. 
> 
> title from [this post](http://hogwarts.co.vu/post/168600841956/let-spill-the-flowers-from-my-ribcage-to-your).

Jake wonders if Amy has cut her hair in the two weeks it’s been since she visited.

She’d always talked about it, in the way that one talks about getting a gym membership, or whether they should stop drinking so much coffee. And of course, he loves her hair long, but, really, he loves any version of her.

It’s the first thing he notices when the clerk gives him the gate money and he wanders into the tiny lobby, where she’s waiting for him, smiling oh so _wide._

Her hair—it barely touches her collarbones, and it’s curled at the ends, slightly.

But he pushes past that, instead taking her into his arms, spinning her around and around and around in that dingy little waiting area, relishing in the sound of her laughter, the sound of tinkling bells and pure joy.

“I missed you so much,” she whispers against his neck.

But then, he puts her back down, and he’s about to kiss her when her face falls, staring dead-eyed at something behind him.

“What?” he asks, but he doesn’t get an answer, because when he turns to look, there’s nothing there: just the dirty, white door that leads back into the prison. He asks again, “What was it?” as he glances back at Amy.

Except Amy isn’t there.

She’s not there.

In her place is Hawkins, face split in half with a devilish smirk. Jake’s chest tightens impossibly, and he wants to run but his feet are cement, frozen to the floor.

“Did you really think I’d slip up that easily, Peralta?”

And everything goes black.

Somehow, he’s jolted awake so much that he’s sitting up, Amy asleep behind him. His torso is still wracked with tension, and he tries to control his heaving breaths, lest he stir the one good thing in his life.

“Jake?”

Too late.

“I’m fine.”

She knows he isn’t.

Her arms move to snake around his waist from behind, hands resting on his hips, she presses her mouth, softly—with barely the weight of a feather, it seems—to the small mole on his left shoulder. Her lips linger there, her breath warm against his skin. He can feel them, almost tickling the shoulder blade, when she whispers, “I’m here.”

It’s just two words—two syllables, six letters, and one mark of punctuation—but they hang there, and every syllable, every letter, every apostrophe lingers in the air for one, two, three beats. And then he feels one of her hands slip, trail up his forearm, and then she’s cupping his cheek in her palm. He nods as she applies a small about of pressure, turning his head slightly, so she can look at him in the face.

Amy’s gaze is soft, eyes wide and imploring.

“I’m here,” she repeats, her thumb smoothing over the crease of his brow.

He wants to tell her how grateful he is—that she never gave up on him and Rosa, that she was in that little dingy lobby when he was finally discharged, that she hugged him tight (tighter than he could ever have imagined), that he wakes up each morning to dark hair in his face and a small nose pressed into his chest or his shoulder blade and the blankets dragged over to her side of the bed.

Jake’s grateful that he wakes up to _her._

(And there’s a small but insistent, screaming, part of him that wants to throw out the heist binder, because his fingers itch for the small velvet box tucked away in a ball of socks, and really it’s a good thing that his underwear drawer is not right beside their bed, because he’s sure that the first time since his release that he was roused from sleep to her light, quick kisses at the edge of his jaw, he would’ve gotten down on one knee on their dumb mattress surrounded by a thousand pillows and spill his goddamn heart out, and all of his planning would go to waste.)

Even as his mind shoots off like this, tumbles down a million different paths, her hand still remains on his cheek, Amy looking at him like he’s that ridiculously expensive set of pens he got her for her birthday last year, like she’s gazing up at the moon on a cloudless night—like she has her entire life in her hands. And maybe she does.

He thinks she’s his, anyways.

She presses her lips to the corner of his mouth, slow and brief and delicate, and when she pulls away, she doesn’t move very far, instead allowing just a few (if he were to be precise, perhaps three) inches of space between them. With her eyelids lowered halfway, her gaze falls to his lap, where he wasn’t even cognizant of how her other hand is enclosed by both of his, the small embrace as natural and automatic as the steady rise and fall of her chest.

“I know not everything’s fine.” Her voice draws his eyes back to hers as she worries her bottom lip. “But I’m here, and I’m so happy you’re here with me.” Almost without realizing it, a smile slips onto his face—small, yes, but he can feel the upturn of his lips and he recognizes a fraction of the gesture contort Amy’s own mouth, her eyes a little wet.

And she’s right—he’s not entirely fine, and neither is Rosa, and neither is the rest of the squad, if he forces himself to think about it.

(He doesn’t want to think about that, doesn’t want to internalize that.)

But being in this little apartment in Brooklyn, with a framed _Die Hard_ poster in the corner of the room and her wrapped so tightly around him, he thinks it all will be fine.

Eventually.

At some point, he knows that they’ll talk about it. They’ll talk about the fear that gripped him every night he was alone in his cell with only a cannibal and a few pictures of her to keep him company. They’ll talk about the unending terror of being trapped with only his thoughts for a multitude of days. They’ll talk about how she knew that not everything was fine in that moment she overheard Romero threaten his life over the tinny speaker, how her entire frame was frozen, paralyzed with the knowledge that someone with the ability to hurt him _wanted_ to.

(They’ll talk about the hours and days she spent at Holt and Kevin’s home, when she couldn’t sleep and she couldn’t bring herself to bother Terry or Charles or even Gina, when their captain sighed something as pained as she felt, wrapping his arms tightly around her before retrieving the blanket from the closet.)

They’ll talk about it.

Eventually.

But for now, he tells her that he loves her _so much_ and when he kisses her, she whispers it back against his lips, her breath warm and somehow sweet even in the dark of the night. Her cheeks are wet—as are his—and he lets go of her hand to brush his fingers against her temple, tuck a stray wisp of hair behind her ear.

She asks if he wants to try for sleep again. He nods, and they recline back to lie against the mattress.

His head on her chest, arms loosely draped across her hips. Fingers sifting through his hair, as his grip at the hem of her worn, cotton top. One of his legs, slotted between hers.

Not for the first time that night, he tries for sleep, and it may not come easily, but eventually he drifts off into something akin to rest, to slumber. And he wakes a few hours later to the blare of an alarm, of Amy’s alarm, but she just leans over, turns it off, and he wraps himself around her just a little tighter.

He thinks that she does the same.

They’ll talk about it all, eventually.

It might be that morning, when they both manage to stumble out of bed, and Amy’s pulling her hair into a short braid. Or perhaps later, over a breakfast of slightly burnt toast and warm tea and honey, leaning over their plates on the couch as early morning cartoons play on the television.

They’ll talk about it all, at some point, maybe far in the future, when Amy still has shreds of paper in her hair and he’s still recovering from getting kidnapped and punched in the throat by a man he considers a father figure, and she whispers against his skin that she missed him _so much._ And he responds in kind, linking their fingers together and kissing them, light.

“I’m here,” she’ll say. “You’re here.”

“I know,” he’ll sigh. “Sometimes, I can’t be, but I want to be.”

They’ll talk about it all.

Eventually.

 

**Author's Note:**

> let me know what you think!!!


End file.
